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This chapter discusses the rise of the vernaculars and changing role of Latin in medieval Europe. It presents the evidence for nuns and other religious women as poets in Latin. It also examines different varieties of religious life for medieval women, and the implications of these different lifestyles for access to Latin literacy. It discusses women and the exercise of authority in medieval Europe (notably by Norman royal ladies): early arguments for the Latin education of noblewomen. The chapter includes specific sections on surviving anonymous Latin verse in women's voices, rotuli (memorial rolls) as evidence for convent literacy, Baudri of Bourgeuil's circle of educated women, particularly Constantia, women Latinists in northern Europe, especially Hildegard of Bingen, the nuns of Helfta, the love-verses from Regensburg, and Willetrudis's Versus de Susanna: it is argued that this last may have been written at Wilton.

The possibility that quantitative clausulae were sought by authors of the Latin literature of the medieval West offers a new means of entering the debate over ‘continuity or discontinuity’ between late antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. The principles and aims of calculating prose rhythm, whether quantitative or tonic, have been changed; but much has returned as well. The variation of prosodical structure between the body and the end of a period may well be due to other reasons than the search for rhythm, such as the general preference of a long word to a short one to close a sentence. If the presented preliminary results are confirmed in the future by larger samples, it may be possible to trace in this twelfth-century prose a tendency towards what was to become the system characteristic of the Italian schools of ars dictaminis, namely a division of functions between the cursus tardus, deputed to minor pauses, and the obligatory cursus uelox, used to conclude nearly every sentence.

This chapter examines the essential elements that produced a full scientific culture in Western Europe by comparing the constituent elements in the one culture in which it developed with other cultures that had the same constitutive elements but did not develop science. These are the control cases, which include India, Tibet, China, and the Byzantine Empire. The first civilization in the world to develop a full scientific culture was medieval Western Europe. It led directly to the scientific revolution—during which some changes to the details of the constituent elements took place—and continued on down to modern science. The essential elements of medieval science were introduced to Western Europe via Classical Arabic civilization. The chapter describes the appearance of science in Medieval Latin Europe and the decline of science in the medieval Islamic world.

This chapter is primarily concerned with Anglo-Latin prose: that is to say, Latin prose composed in Anglo-Saxon England between roughly 650 and 1050. It poses the question of the extent to which Anglo-Latin authors were aware of different stylistic registers, and how well they understood what diction was appropriate to either prose or verse. Using the example of Bede as a starting point, the chapter provides a list of those features of poetic diction that are found, in varying degrees, in the authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The seven criteria presented provide a crude measuring-stick against which to assess the poeticism of the principal authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The study of poeticism in Anglo-Latin prose, and in medieval Latin literature in general, is a subject that awaits exploration.

Revival of the liberal arts and classical studies at several times was responsible for multiple periods of influx of Greek and Latin loanwords in English. This chapter outlines the works that were influential on the external history of English in connection with the continental background to the events in the British Isles discussed in previous chapters. The main topics are Ecclesiastical Latin, the reforms of Alcuin and Medieval Latin, the Humanistic and Neolatin of the Renaissance, the effects of printing and other factors on standardization, latinate vocabulary in Shakespeare and other literary works, and the technical and scientific terminology in the post‐Renaissance period.

Vivienne Law acquired a mastery of the field of late antique and early Medieval Latin grammar, her first task was to familiarise herself with the early medieval manuscripts in which grammatical texts were transmitted. This task necessitated constant travel to British and continental libraries in order to provide herself with transcriptions of grammatical texts; it also necessitated the acquisition of a huge collection of microfilms of grammatical manuscripts. Her work on these manuscripts soon revealed a vast and uncharted sea of unedited and unstudied grammatical texts, for the most part anonymous. A major component of her life's work was the attempt to chart this sea. Her earliest publications reveal a profound experience of grammatical manuscripts and a refusal simply to reiterate the opinions of earlier scholars. All these publications report new discoveries, such as previously unknown Old English glosses to the Ars grammatica of Tatwine, an early 8th-century Anglo-Saxon grammarian; or unsuspected aspects of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and continental learning as revealed in the transmission of the grammars of Boniface and Tatwine; or the true nature of the jumbled and misunderstood grammar attributed to the early Irish grammarian Malsachanus.

Much attention has been paid to the Gregorius-tradition in Germany. The medieval German poem by Hartmann von Aue, based on the early French version, is important as a major work of literature, and many further texts were based upon it. Those in prose are treated in the next chapter. This chapter analyses Hartmann’s work, his use of paradox and of complex cumulative imagery, and his presentation of a philosophy of sin and grace deriving partly from Gregory the Great, and stressing again the dangers of despairing in God. Two medieval Latin poems also derive from Hartmann, the more theological full version by Arnold of Lübeck and a brief anonymous poem in hexameters from south Germany designed for school rhetoric lessons.

This chapter juxtaposes the theory and the practice of philology in the late nineteenth-century race to produce a modern critical edition of the Liber pontificalis. The resulting works, one by the French priest and church historian Louis Duchesne, the other by the classicist and German patriot Theodor Mommsen, showcase the editors’ divergent aims in the application of recensionist criticism, shaped as it was by their scholarly, national, religious, and personal loyalties. Mommsen’s edition adheres to the principles of ‘German’ critical philology and its desire to recover the original text; Duchesne’s two volumes exploit the nature of the medieval papal chronicle as a constantly changing ‘living text’ in order to emphasize the historical significance of its reception. Both editions illustrate the themes of marginality and canonicity as they relate to literary genre and historical period, to religious commitment and national sentiment, and to the tension between classical methodology and medieval texts.

This chapter discusses the intellectual and the educational life of the Mediterranean world during the period of late antiquity, as well as during the centuries that ensued in the medieval Latin West. The intellectual atmosphere and educational traditions in this region could be considered tension-ridden. Foremost among these conflicts was the ongoing tension between philosophical reason and biblical revelation. This tension predated the medieval centuries and persisted into the modern era. In addition, there was the tension between rhetoricians and philosophers, which could be traced from Athens of the fourth century BCE. This conflict makes its presence felt down to the present, though of late, it has functioned as a scarcely recognized factor amid the “alarms of struggle and flight.”

After surveying a variety of apologetical and polemical Christian texts on Islam which circulated in medieval Eastern and Latin Christendom, this study traces the changing Christian perceptions of, and responses to, Islam. The trajectory followed in this study shows a progression from widespread — with few, precious exceptions — views of Islam as barbarism and idolatry, doomed to soon disappear, to more serious considerations of Islam as the theological ones that emerged in the late Middle Ages, when Ecclesiastic authorities began to address it on adoctrinal basis, as a Christological heresy. This study argues that, within a faulty understanding of Islam and of his Prophet, but outside the prevailing views at his time, Dante’s portrayal of Islam and his Prophet in Inferno 28 is the expression Dante’s own peculiar understanding of the Islamic faith and of Muhammad’s life. Subtly distinguishing between heresy and schism, Dante’ s Muhammad concludes that the image of the Prophet in the eighth circle of Hell is reminiscent of Arius, a controversial figure connected with a long history of theological division within Christendom. Additional arguments pointing at Dante’s references to Arius in Paradiso 13, and at the strong influence on Dante of Boethius’s writings and vicissitudes — especially his martyrdom by decree of the Arian king Theodoric — further explain the violation of the unity of the Christian community, which is the center of Inferno 28.